High performance scalar multiplication for ECC

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN's) are being widely used in various civilian and military applications. In certain WSN applications, the data among the nodes and the Base Station (BS), needs to be exchanged in a secure manner. The encryption and decryption operations over the data involve additional energy overhead. Hence, it is required to use a security model, which offers security with less computational requirements, as WSN nodes have resource constraints. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), a public key cryptographic system, has lesser key size requirements in comparison with RSA algorithm. ECC has been gaining acceptance as another alternative to RSA. In ECC, scalar multiplication accounts for about 80 % of the key calculation time [1]. This work presents an optimized Sliding Window method with 1's complement technique for scalar multiplication. The same is also compared with two other methods of scalar multiplication, Binary Method and Non-Adjacent Form (NAF) method.